Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing

I’m really passionate about digital marketing. Having worked in marketing for almost 15 years now, I should either love it or hate it. Luckily for me I love it.

Marketing and in particular, digital marketing is a bit of a dark art. Most of the time it goes on around you and you are blissfully unaware. That’s the subtlety of most good digital marketing. It’s only when you start your own business or have your own website, you start to look into this area in much more detail.

Over the years, I’ve had a number of friends ask me to give them some advice on how they can make their website more visible on Google. I always take the time to have a look at their website and then give them tailored advice on what they could be doing differently. I think this advice is much appreciated as it is specific to their website and their business needs. It’s all well and good going on a generic SEO course or looking up information on the internet, but a lot of the time there’s a lot of jargon and overly technical information, which is mumbo jumbo to many business owners. I’ve also found there to be a lot of old and irrelevant information out there and it would be easy to follow this ‘advice’ when actually this isn’t the most up-to-date information available.

Understanding the fundamentals of SEO is really important to a business that relies a lot on website traffic or one that wants to grow using web traffic. You can pay for pay-per-click (PPC) adverts on a search engine like Google or Bing, but this can be very costly and not very effective for many businesses. This is why many start-ups rely on good rankings in the organic search results to drive visitors to their website. This is a sensible, long-term and commercially viable strategy for most small businesses.

Throughout the years, Google have penalised hundreds of small and very large businesses for trying to manipulate their algorithm that determines the rank order of websites on its search results. You only have to Google the words ‘Interflora SEO’ and you’ll be confronted by a list of articles about a large business getting it very wrong. This wasn’t an isolated incident, throughout my time working in digital marketing I’ve read countless articles and heard multiple stories of companies being wiped out due to them losing their search rankings on Google. Mainly due to them using outdated practices. Google launched a series of algorithm updates starting in 2011 known as Panda. This was a real shake up of the industry as it lowered the rank of weak, thin, low quality websites and improved the ranking of those who had rich, relevant content. This was the end of a lot of bad SEO practices. Since then, Google have gone on to make a lot more updates to Panda. You can keep an eye on the Panda updates (as well as lot of other algorithm updates) via the Google Blog.

The best advice about how to tailor your website for better rankings on search engines is to seek personalised recommendations for your business. Richman Training can help with this. They offer an interactive training course, which can help you build your digital marketing strategy around your specific needs.